There’s a podcast I love by a comedian who talks all the time about growing up Catholic. He talks about the prayers and the liturgies and the culture of Catholicism. But since his childhood, he talks as if he has evolved past Catholicism and Christianity; I don’t know what he’d call it, maybe humanism or something like that.

But if I got to sit down with him, I’d want to ask him, What if it’s true?

If it’s true, then surely life looks like a miracle. The mundanity of our daily lives might continue, but all of it will be pierced through with a holy tint. If it’s true, then what Frederick Buechner wrote is also true:

“What's lost is nothing to what's found, and all the death that ever was, set next to life, would scarcely fill a cup.”

-Godric1

I would love to sit with this comedian and tell him, “If it’s true, then there is more.”

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David Brooks wrote an enthralling account of his coming to faith in the New York Times a few days ago. He wrote of those moments—some use the word “numinous”—which transcend understanding. He quoted one man’s account of them:

“It was like the effect of some great orchestra when all the separate notes have melted into one swelling harmony that leaves the listener conscious of nothing save that his soul is being wafted upward and almost bursting with its own emotion.”

These are moments in which everything feels wrapped up in beauty and transcendence, moments that—given a million, billion words—no author could accurately convey. These drew Brooks—and they draw us—upward towards the throne of God. Or perhaps, more accurately, these moments bring God’s throne down closer to earth.

And Christmas is this: a supreme numinous moment, a glorious place of transcendence, of beauty, of passion—God becoming human in the most normal, human way.

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The thing about the numinous, the thing about experiencing God, is that it can happen in the most unlikely place. Brooks talks of experiencing God at the base of a mountain and overlooking a lake and in a subway car. All of a sudden, holiness and transcendence burst through the seams of reality and into the world we inhabit.

When we think of these moments, we usually think of the “mountaintop experience.” Like Brooks, we imagine sitting at a lake in the Colorado Rockies, or we think of church camp as a high school student.

But the numinous can, paradoxically, break through at the low-point of our existences too. God has a way of being with us, of revealing a bit of heaven, in the tragic. He is known as the great Comforter for a reason.

Christian Wiman, in My Bright Abyss (quoted at length in Brooks’ essay, and one of my favorite books), writes that two experiences helped him return to the Christian faith: falling in love and receiving his cancer diagnosis. One the height of earthly ecstasy, the other a devastation. He found he did not have words outside the religious to convey what was happening. Suddenly, things made since when linked to Christian vocabulary.2

This bursting has happened a few times for me. It once happened on the side of a mountain, and it also happened in a hospital bed. I have been surrounded by people and have been utterly alone. The red thread through it all has been God’s presence. I can’t tell you exactly what it felt like, but it felt like peace and freedom, as if all the fruit of the Spirit had sprouted in my heart and burst forth from the ground in dazzling sunshine.

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The Christmas story has both the quiet and the loud, the mountain top and the valley.

First, the quiet: Jesus was born on a side street, behind a hostel, surrounded by animals, overlooked, unseen, unnoticed. Mary and Joseph knew what was happening thanks to the angel, but they weren’t in their hometown and were away from family. But still, God was present; the weightiness of his love came through Mary’s womb. It was numinous.

Then, the loud: shepherds watching their sheep. Suddenly, the skies exploded with the miraculous, with angels and glory and the excitement of salvation. God was present there as well; the weightiness of his love coming out of each mouth singing, proclaiming the good news, a good news filled with fearlessness and grace.

God was present; God is present. The Christmas story is alive.

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I was once asked to give the Christmas talk at a YoungLife club just north of Boston. Committee members who had been following Jesus for years would be there alongside students who thought of God as a genie or an angry father or an old man in the sky. How was I supposed to convey the Christmas message—that God broke through reality to enter reality in order to love and save and cherish his creation—in a way that worked?

I don’t know if I accomplished it, but I decided to emphasize the fact that Jesus entered in the most normal of ways. He did not walk out of Mary’s womb with a top hat and a baton singing “Mary Did You Know?” The chorus to “All I Do is Win” was not blasting out of the subwoofers in the stable’s rafters. No, he came the way all babies came, through pain and pushing and newborn crying. In a way, his coming was completely mundane.

I told them he came that way because he wanted to be one of us. Fully God, to be sure, but still one of us. He wanted to relate with us, to understand us experientially. He wanted in on the human story. Ultimately, he wanted to use his humanity to save humanity, to enter our realities, whether falling in love or receiving the diagnosis, whether on the side of a mountain or in a hospital bed.

And that’s the final thing I want to say about the numinous: it often appears in the mundane realities of life. It is mixed into the earthy realities of being alive. God with us means God with us, in the everyday, sticking closer than a brother.

Amen and amen and amen.

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So, to that podcaster, I want to ask once again: what if there’s more?

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